NCAA -- Being and Nothingness

You may have read a couple years ago about a deal where some classes on the schedule at the University of North Carolina turned out to be, strictly speaking, fake. They didn't really meet or exist or anything, but students signed up for them, got course credit for them and often posted pretty good grades.

Oh, and almost half of those students were also UNC student-athletes. You probably don't need me to tell you that student athletes make up nowhere near half of its student body. But if you do then it might be that you work for the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which earlier this month decided that the fraud UNC committed against academic standards, the idea of education, the taxpayers and supporters of UNC and its own students was not its problem.

You see, it turns out that because half of the students who gained from the fake classes weren't student athletes, then by gosh and golly the NCAA sees this as a matter for the school to decide itself. After all, it says "Athletes" right there in the name and far be it from the NCAA to get itself mixed up in the academic side of university life. That's "school stuff," and the NCAA knows it's out of bounds. And the outsized role UNC plays in men's college basketball has absolutely nothing to do with it, you nattering nabob of negativism.

Shannon Watkins, who wrote the Noble Center article linked above, brings the proper amount of dripping scorn to bear on the mummer's dance of a university at Chapel Hill. She points out that even though the fake class mess has been cleaned up, all of the conditions that spawned it still exist. Student athletes are still admitted to UNC even though their grades and test scores fall below the minimum standards for college readiness. They're still expected to achieve above-average marks in classes paced for students with higher scores who don't have the equivalent of a full-time job in the form of athletic practices and competitions. And they're brought on without any concern for what this might mean for their future if they aren't among the microscopic percentage of athletes who play their sports professionally.

Sure, the chances are good that someone would sue the NCAA if it went ahead and dropped the hammer UNC earned right smack in the middle of its Tarheel tail. And given the technicality around which the organization wound its invertebrate self, the chances are also good that a judge would toss any sufficient penalty and rend the tattered sackcloth of its credibility even more.

So UNC will be allowed to keep the gasoline and matches that started this fire as long as they promise to never play with them again. And the kids who signed up for the fake classes get to keep their fake A and B's.

Whether or not they can identify any of the letters that come after them, though, is apparently not anyone's concern.